Commentary on Political Economy

Monday, 4 June 2012

The Philosophy of the Flesh (Continued - Arendt to Croce)

Here is another excerpt of notes from our recent effort to re-think a Marxist ontology that can answer to the practical political and social needs of our age. I hope friends appreciate what may seem as a "distraction" from more topical politico-economic analysis and current developments. I think, however, that we need to elucidate these "fundamental" matters of Marxist philosophy if we are to present a coherent framework of practical action in our political conduct. Cheers to all!

Merleau-Ponty, to my knowledge the only
philosopher who not only tried to give an account of the organic structure of
human existence but also tried in all earnest to embark upon a “philosophy of
the flesh”, was still misled by the old identification of mind and soul when he
defined the mind as “the other side
of the body” since “there is a body of the mind and a mind of the body and a
chiasm between them”. Precisely the lack of such chiasmata or crossings over is
the crux of mental phenomena and Merleau-Ponty himself, in a different context,
recognized the lack with great clarity. Thought, he writes, is “‘fundamental’
because it is not borne by anything, but not fundamental as if with it one
reached a foundation upon which one ought to base oneself and stay. As matter
of principle, fundamental thought is bottomless. It is, if you wish, an abyss.”
But what is true of the mind is not true of the soul and vice versa. The soul,
though perhaps much darker than the mind will ever manage to be, is not
“bottomless”; it does indeed “overflow” into the body; it “encroaches upon it,
is hidden in it – and at the same time needs it, terminates in it, is anchored in it” (Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p33, this last
quotation is from Augustine, De Civitate
Dei).

This is not the
first time that we pick on Arendt for her stubborn attachment to this
distinction between “mind”and “soul”. There is indeed a distinction to be made
between “emotional thought” and “abstract thought” – but both “modes of
thinking” are just aspects of mental life that are different only in their
“content”, not in their “fundamentality” or their ontological status. And this
is what Merleau-Ponty is saying but Arendt cannot comprehend because of her
attachment, again, to the distinction between “cognitive thought” which is
oriented to “truth-as-certainty” (logico-mathematics and scientific
regularities) and “thinking” proper, which for her includes “meaning” but which
in effect ends up referring to logico-deductive and formal-rational, in short,
“abstract thought”. Only in this regard does her own thought differ from Kant’s
basic distinction between the thinking ego, whose eminent faculties are the
understanding and reason, and the soul or the self. Kant ends up “reducing” all
thinking to cognitive thought or thought directed at “certainty” and “truth”.
Arendt instead categorises this as only a branch of abstract thought, of which “meaning”
forms the greater part. But as we will see, Arendt bases her entire argument on
the “otherness” of “thinking” – its being in the world and yet apart from it –
precisely and ontologically on the “truth-status” of logico-mathematical
abstract thinking or reasoning – on Kant’s notions of intellect and reason.
Although she agrees that thought is an “abyss”, it is “fundamental”, because it
is only through “thought” that we are able to pose the most fundamental questions
of existence and reality, she fails to understand thereby that from the
ontological standpoint even abstract thought still constitutes an “emotional”
aspect of the life of the mind - however “cool” or “impassive” or
“dis-interested” it may appear - of which its “intellectuality” is only a part
or subset thereof. Mental activity, whether intellectual or emotional, is one
and the same: the problem is that too often we con-fuse, as clearly does
Arendt, the “focus” or “mode” of thought with its “real referent”, with its
“object” (which, as we will see in our critique of Heidegger’s Kantbuch, is no “ob-ject” at all) – as
if emotive thought dealt with “the soul” and intellectual thought dealt instead
with “the mind ” as “pure activity”, and then split itself again into
“rational” and “meaningful” activities. Contrary to what Arendt believes, both intellectual and emotive thought have
repercussions on “the body” – and to this extent Merleau-Ponty is quite right
to insist on “the mind of the body” and vice versa, rather than just “the soul
of the body” and vice versa, and their chiasmata, their crossings-over.

The stumbling
block for Arendt is a distinction that she makes and that Merleau-Ponty does
not tackle whilst Nietzsche certainly did and, by so doing, made one of his
greatest discoveries, what we have called “Nietzsche’s Invariance”, which is
that cognitive thought (logico-mathematics) and reflective thought, both of
which make up “abstract or intellectual thought”, are not “separate” from other
modes of thinking – and that indeed
“thought and body” cannot be “separated” the way Arendt earnestly wishes they
could! The mind has a “life” also in this “sense” or “meaning”, what Arendt
calls “the sixth sense” (pp49-50): - that it cannot be separated from “life”,
even in its most “abysmal” or “fundamental” intuitive or rational cognitive or
abstract functions. Arendt clearly mistakes what Merleau-Ponty means by
“fundamental”: thought is not “borne” by any “thing” not because it is in
opposition to or contrast with “the world of things” – because, as Arendt
herself points out, thinking beings are not just “in the world but also of the
world”. Rather, thought is “fundamental” because it is only through thought
that we can intuit the nature of reality. But this intuition tells us precisely
what Arendt (and Heidegger, then Kant, as we are about to see) refuses to
acknowledge: - that thought is immanent in
life and the world, that it cannot “abstract” from the latter, even in its most
“intellectual” modes and functions and operations. This is what Nietzsche,
first among philosophers, discovered. And here we come to “self-evident
truths”.

Arendt’s The Life of the Mind is quite evidently
erected on the misconception that Kant operated a dichotomy or an opposition –
a Platonic chorismos – between
“things in themselves” (the Ideas) and “mere appearances”, between the “(true)
world” and its effects. Yet this is not correct – because Kant emphatically
elevates those “mere appearances” to ineluctable
a-spects of the thing in itself so that no real ultimate “opposition”
exists between the two. As Heidegger puts it at p23 of the Kantbuch:

In the Opus
Postumum Kant says that the

thing in itself is not a being different
from the appearance, i.e., "the difference

between the concept of a thing in itself
and the appearance is not objective

but merely subjective. The thing in itself
is not another Object, but is rather

another aspect(respectus) of the representation of the
same Object."42

Where the
opposition arises is not between appearances and things in themselves but
rather between pure intuition and “thing”, between perception and reflection,
between perception and knowledge, between knowledge and reason, between idea
and object – whence “transcendental idealism”
-, and finally between Subject and Object. This is why Schopenhauer could
celebrate in “the distinction between appearance and thing in itself….Kant’s
greatest discovery” – because he could see immediately that in fact there
cannot be any “dualism” between perception and knowledge and that therefore the real dichotomy was to be
located between the Understanding and its “representations” on one side and the
Will, the true “thing in itself”, on the other – with the two making up “the
world”: hence, “the world as will and representation” (or Idea). Heidegger has
enucleated and illustrated, with characteristic didactic and analytical
brilliance, this important aspect of Kantian meta-physics: for Kant there is no
“opposition” whatsoever between “things in themselves” and “appearances” – nor
are the latter “caused” by the former; rather, for the Koenigsberger,
appearances are the necessary
manifestation of “things” as “beings-in-the-world” open to perception by the thinking ego of human beings (Heidegger
calls them “things for us” in What is a
thing? At about p5) who then (and here comes causality) “orders” them into
“concepts” or constructions from which deductions (synthetic a priori statements)
can be made by pure reason. It is not the case that for Kant “appearances” are
“mere” and therefore false events (Geschehen) that need to be interpreted
in the light of the “things” that cause them. Arendt’s miscomprehension can be
gleaned when she summarises Kant’s position as follows:

“His notion of a ‘thing in itself’, something which is but does not appear although it causes appearances, can
be…explained on the grounds of the theological tradition,” (LotM, p40).

Kant was carried away by his great desire
to…make it overwhelmingly plausible that ‘there undoubtedly is something distinct from the world which contains the
ground for the order of the world’, and therefore is itself of a higher order,”
(p42).

Yet Kant says
precisely what Arendt seems to be saying: - that the “thing in itself” does appear; in fact, it can do nothing else but appear to human
beings – who can never com-prehend it fully.What is of a “higher order” for Kant is not at all the “thing in itself” as
a “thing for us” but rather the thing in itself as either God or as the
thinking ego, which he confines to Pure Reason but “which contains the ground [not the cause!] for the order of
the world”. The difference between the thinking ego and “other” things in
themselves (the “things for us”) is that the former is the faculty that can
“give order” [Sinn-gebende] to the
world…made up of other things in themselves, which are so named because they
are not knowable “in themselves” and not because “they do not appear”!Unlike Plato or Mach, Kant does not sanctify
the lofty philosopher or scientist who rises above the apparent world. Quite to
the contrary, and this is a point that Arendt keenly appreciates (p41), Kant
bases himself precisely on this world of appearances from which that of noumena
can be deduced thanks to the intellect and reason. Perception is the
construction, what “conducts to”, from which reason can derive its synthetic deductions.

By failing to
understand this subtle yet essential point of the Kantian critique, Arendt
cannot undo and re-erect her own “phenomenology of the flesh” on proper
ontological foundations; for the simple reason that her privileging of appearances or phenomena over things in themselves
or noumena or qualitates occultae is
indistinguishable from Kant’s transcendental
idealism even and especially where the ground for separating the thinking
ego from the self is concerned, which remains firmly bound to the
transcendental attitude – the thinking ego as “sheer [or pure!] activity”.
Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s exaltation or elevation of perception from
“secondary” (the effect of “things” or “objects”) to “primary” (the dis-closure
of the “object” that presupposes its partial “invisibility” or “nothing-ness”)
is tightly chained to this philosophical “framework”. Arendt amply demonstrates
and corroborates this conclusion when describing her own understanding of the
difference between thinking ego and the self:

The thinking ego is indeed Kant’s “thing
in itself”: it does not appear to others and unlike the self of self-awareness
it does not appear to itself, and yet “it is not nothing”. The thinking ego is sheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless,
without qualities and without a life story…For
the thinking ego is not the self” (pp42-3).

And here is the
crux. The crucial characteristic of the transcendental attitude rests not on
the distinction between the true world and the apparent world, but rather on
the conception of human intuition as “ordering the world”, on the separation
between the intuitive and the conceptual tasks of the mind. This is what
Merleau-Ponty was attempting to circumvent with “the topology of being”, yet
failed to achieve because of that “and
yet ‘it is not nothing’”! Heidegger’s explication of this Kantian
expression in What is a Thing? (atp5) brilliantly and instructively
distinguishes between two kinds of things in themselves: - those that “appear”
to us [things for us] and those that do not “and yet are not nothing”, such as
God and the thinking ego. See also par.5 at p22 of the Kantbuch: “The Essence of the Finitude of Human Knowledge”:

Appearances [Erscheinungen] are not
mere illusion [Schein], but are the being

itself. And again, this being is not
something different from the thing in itself,

but rather this [thing in itself) is
precisely a being. The being itself can
be

apparent
without the being "in itself" (i.e., as a thing which stands forth)
being

known. The double characterization of the being
as "thing in itself" and as

"appearance" corresponds to the
twofold manner according to which it [the

Being] can stand in relationship to
infinite and finite knowing: the being in

the standing-forth
[Entstand] and the same being as object [Gegenstand].19

Arendt fails to
make this distinction and so believes that all Kantian things in themselves are
the same and that her distinction of Being and Appearance and above all that
between the thinking ego and pure reason is what sets her own theoretical
approach to thinking apart from Kant’s in that Kant, although he did not like
Descartes con-fuse thinking ego and soul or mind and self, reduced the thinking
ego and all thinking to pure reason! Yet we can see that she is mistaken about
Kant’s notion of things in themselves, for one, and that her distinction of the
thinking ego from the self coincides with Kant’s except in the essential aspect
of pure reason or “abstract thought” which, we argue, is the only way in which
Arendt can uphold her distinction
between thinking ego and self in any case! The self is a “thing for us” because
its “psychological” manifestations are “apparent” or “visible” to us. But the
thinking ego is not “visible” because it deals with “pure concepts” and because
its “content” are these pure concepts, so that both the thinking ego and “its”
pure concepts are things in themselves
or noumena or notions (Begriffe – this applies to Hegel’s
‘Logic’) that “trans-scend” the a-spects
or appearances or phenomena of the “things for us”, whether formally
(Kant), dialectically (Hegel) or existentially (Heidegger). (Cf. Croce, Logica come Scienza del Concetto Puro,
from p8 and Heidegger, Kantbuch at
par.6, p24 for discussions on the “purity” of concepts as reflections on
representations arising from intuition: “Knowledge
[and therefore thinking] is primarily intuition, i.e., a representing that
immediately represents the being itself,”[p19].)

So long as
“chiasmata” are possible between body and soul, immanence is assured. But it is
when the “mind” is considered, as Arendt considers it, as “sheer activity”,
when the ageless, sexless, thinking ego
without qualities fails to appear, and yet “it is not nothing” and like God
it is not a “thing for us” - when this “fundament” or “abyss” is considered mystically, then we have trans-scendence, the op-position of Subjet and Object
– a theo-logy that Arendt exposes but
cannot avoid. This is the underpinning of Schopenhauer’s (then Nietzsche’s)
devastating critique of Kant’s transcendentalism – something to which Heidegger
comes close with his own critique of the Schematismus
whilst relapsing into the transcendentalism that Schopenhauer’s “will and
representation as ‘the individual subject-object’” could not elude . In other words,
Arendt cannot consistently maintain the difference between thinking ego and
self – unless she relies on the “rational-regulatory” or conceptual-deductive
function of the thinking ego as pure reason! We shall soon see just how
essential this function of thinking is to Arendt’s ultimately fallacious
distinction between thinking ego as “sheer activity” and the self or soul as a
chiasmus with the body!

Arendt speaks of

the paradoxical
condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of
appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits
the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or
transcend it,” (‘LotM’, p43).

Yet so long as
Arendt keeps speaking of “the world of appearances”, she will be stuck with
this “paradoxical condition” for the simple reason that she exalts, like Kant
and even Heidegger, the “primacy” or “primordiality” or “purity”, the “sheer
activity” – the “transcendence”! - of thought and intuition over their “materiality”
or “sensuousness” or immanence. For to say that thought can “withdraw from the
world” because of its “abstract” and “inescapable”
(a reference again to logico-mathematical thought) character or quality is
effectively equivalent to saying that thought “trans-scends” life and the world,
however much Arendt may eschew this conclusion! Tertium non datur: unless Arendt can enlighten us about the
ontological status of “the mind”, she has no grounds to back the assertion that
“the mind [can] withdraw from the world
without ever being able to leave it or transcend it”. The “life of the
mind” then becomes an “impossible chiasmus”, indeed an oxy-moron. An
illustration of this miscomprehension can be gleaned from Arendt’s critical
comments on P.F. Strawson’s presumption, characteristic of the Oxford analytical school, in a passage she
quotes from one of his essays on Kant:

It is indeed an old belief that reason is
something essentially out of time and
yet in us. Doubtless it has its ground in the fact that…we grasp [mathematical
and logical] truths. But…one [who] grasps timeless truths [need not] himself be
timeless,” (Strawson quoted on p45).

What neither
Strawson nor Arendt understand, and this is the reason why they are entangled
in this “paradoxical condition”, is that “mathematical and logical truths” are
neither “true” nor “timeless” because both notions are “transcendental” and
therefore antinomical. It is simply not possible for someone who is not
“timeless” to be able “to grasp timeless truths” that are, by definition, “out
of time” – unless one posits the “transcendence” of “reason” and its “timeless
truths”! But that would be tantamount to allowing that there ec-sist entities
of thought or reason that are “out of time” even though those entities are “thoughts”
originating in the mind of a “thinker” who is not “time-less”!

The notions of
“truth” and “timelessness” require precisely that “com-prehensive being or
grasping-from-the-knower” [Jaspers’s Um-greifende
or Heidegger’s Totalitat] or
“totality” or “being-in-itself” - not “for us”, that belongs to “what is not
and yet it is not nothing” (cf. Kantbuch,
pp18-22) - that directly contra-dicts both their ec-sistence (either in
space-time or in “place”) and the “finitude” of the knower! The prism that distorts the entire Western
ontological tradition’s view of reality is precisely this notion of
“self-evident truths” as “comprehensive being” or “totality” or
“being-in-itself”. This is the prism, the illusion, that Nietzsche’s Invariance
smashes mercilessly to smithereens. For a “truth” to ec-sist it must be
“com-prehensible” (Heidegger uses the term “umgreifen”
early in the Kantbuch, at par.5, p20)
and therefore, unlike the Kantian and Schopenhauerian “thing in itself”, “within” time: it must be intra-temporal and intra-mundane. But then it cannot possibly be “time-less”! A
“timeless truth” does not ec-sist: it is either a tautology or else it is “a
practical tool”, an “instrument”, and as such neither “true” nor “false”, just
as the world is neither “true” nor “apparent”. As Heidegger’s discussion in
par.5 of the ‘Kantbuch’ reveals (at p19 especially), the whole notion of
“comprehensive grasping” or “totality”, indeed the entire Kantian effort to tie
intuition to thinking and then both to knowledge, has to do with the
“communicability” of intuition.

Knowledge [and therefore thinking] is
primarily intuition, i.e., a representing that immediately represents the being
itself. However, if finite intuition is now to be knowledge, then it must be
able to make the being itself as revealed accessible with respect to both what
and how it is for everyone at all times. Finite, intuiting creatures must be
able to share in the specific intuition of beings. First of all, however, finite
intuition as intuition always remains bound to the specifically intuited particulars.
The intuited is only a known being if everyone can make it understandable to
oneself and to others and can thereby communicate it.

The whole pyramidal structure from perception
to conception, from intuition to the intellect and reason, from conduction to
deduction, has no other aim than to explain how it is possible for human beings
“to share perceptions as knowledge”! It is this “crystallisation” of symbolic
interaction, that Nietzsche shattered by exposing its con-ventionality. And it
is instructive to see how Benedetto Croce deals with this critique in the Logica. Having already tersely lampooned
the “aestheticist” critique of “pure concepts” which denies their validity and
existence in favour of sensuous “experience” and activity such as the artistic,
and then the “mystical” critique which, like Wittgenstein, insists that what is
truly worthwhile is what cannot be spoken of, Croce then turns to the
“arbitrary” or “empiricist” critique (which surely must count Nietzsche among
its proponents):

Croce does not accept that
concepts are “conventions” or, as he prefers to call them on behalf of the
critics, “fictions”. As proof of the erroneity of this “critique”, Croce
enlists the “tu quoque”; in other words, this “arbitrarist” critique of logic
and pure concepts is itself a logical
argument based on concepts – and therefore it is either equally false like all
logic, or else it must claim validity on logical grounds, and thence confirm
the validity of “its” concepts, and therefore the validity of “conceptual
reality” in any case (see ‘Logica’, p12). What Croce fails to grasp is that, so
far as Nietzsche is concerned, the “crystallization” critique does not deny the
“reality” of concepts; indeed, if anything, it highlights and warns against
their “efficacity”. But this “efficacity” is made possible not by their
“transcendental” or “pure” status – as “timeless truths”, for instance – but
rather by their “immanent” status, by their “instrumental” character as “an act
of will”. Not the “innateness” of these concepts, but their “instrumentality”
is what matters – not Augustine’s “in interiore homine habitat veritas” (cited
and discussed by Merleau-Ponty in ‘Phenom.ofPerception’, at p.xi) but the
content of the act of perception is
what constitutes “life and the world” for us. Earlier, Croce had emphasized the
“active” side of concepts as human representations of intuited reality –
privileging yet again the “spiritual” nature of “concepts” as dependent on
intuition and experience yet “separate” from it.

But this contrast is almost
palpably fictitious, opposing high-sounding concepts in what is almost a play
of words, and simply fails to tell us why and how concepts and representations
differ ontologically. Croce ends up
rehashing the Kantian Schematismus
with the “pure concepts” of “beauty, finality, quantity and quality” and so
forth whose content is furnished by “fictional concepts” such as universals
(nouns) and abstract concepts like those of mathematics (cf. Logica,ch.2 at p18). But in fact, as we have tried to show here invoking
the aid of Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology of perception”, neither of Croce’s
“pre-suppositions of logical activity”, that is, intuition and language (see
pp5-6 of Logica), is such that
logical activity can be separated onto-logically from them. Croce insists that
a concept must be “expressible” – whence the essentiality of language to it, no
less than intuition or “representation”:

We have here once again the
Platonic chorismos, the Scholastic adaequatio,the Kantian noumenon, and the Fichtean hiatus irrationalem – in other words,
that “antinomy” that requires a “leap” (trans-scendence) from experience to
thought. Except that what Croce believes to identify as a “particular” is already and immanently identical with a
“universal”: not only is a concrete experience already a universal, but so is a
universal abstraction also a concrete experience! Both are “representations”
(cf. Croce’s contrary argument on pp.28-9). This is the basis of Schopenhauer’s
critique of Kant’s separation of intuition from understanding and again from
pure reason, in the sense that the Kantian “universal” is toto genere different from the particular and cannot therefore represent it separately in an ontological
sense! Croce’s own categorization of these notions is at p.42 of the Logica:

Evident is Croce’s obstinacy in
seeking to differentiate, however vainly, “thought” from “perception” or
“representation” or “intuition”: - an effort that must remain vain because no
onto-logical priority can be given to “thought” over “matter” and because
indeed no “thought” is possible without perception and vice versa. A world
without thought would be a world without life, and a world without life would
not be a world at all! That is not to say that thought takes precedence
ontologically over the world – because it is essential to the “world”; the two
are “co-naturate”, Deus sive Natura. For universals and particulars, for
abstract thought and concrete intuition, to be able to enter into a practical
real relation with each other, they must “participate” (Nicholas of Cusa’s
“methexis”) in the same immanent reality! Indeed, it seems obvious to us that
perception and thought are immanently connected: methexis replaces chorismos.
Here is Merleau-Ponty:

The true Cogito does not define the subject’s
existence in terms of the thought he has of existing

and furthermore does
not convert the indubitability of thought about the world, nor finally does it
replace the world itself by the world as meaning. On the contrary it recognizes
my thought itself as an inalienable fact, and does away with any kind of
idealism in revealing me as 'being-in-the-world'. (PoP, p.xiii).

To seek the
essence of perception is to declare that perception is, not presumed true, but
defined as access to truth. So, if I now wanted, according to idealistic
principles, to base

this defacto
self-evident truth, this irresistible belief, on some absolute

self-evident
truth, that is, on the absolute clarity which my thoughts

have for me; if I
tried to find in myself a creative thought which bodied

forth the
framework of the world or illumined it through and through,

I should once more
prove unfaithful to my experience of the world,

and should be
looking for what makes that experience possible

instead of looking
for what it is. The self-evidence of perception is not

adequate thought
or apodeictic self-evidence. The world is
not what I think but what I live through [m.e.].
I am open to the world, I have nodoubt
that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it;it is inexhaustible. 'There is a world', or rather:
'There is the world';

I can never
completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion

in my life. This
facticity of the world is what constitutes the

Weltlichkeit der Welt, what causes the world to be the world; just as

the facticity of
the cogito is not an imperfection in itself, but rather

what assures me of
my existence,” (PoP, pp.xvi-xvii).

Merleau-Ponty reiterates here
the Nietzschean “vivo ergo cogito”,
with the peccadillos that he refers to the “self-evident truth of perception”
(what is truth if, as he immediately yet unwittingly corrects himself, it is
not backed by “some absolute self-evident truth”?) and then the obvious
reference to the ‘I’, the Husserlian “transcendental ego” or “subject”.

1 comment:

Regardless Of Whatever Is Said By Whoever Says It -Higgs Particle YOK.

S Hawking is simply wrong in accepting it. Obviously wrong.Everyone who accepts the story of the Higgs particle is simply wrong.Plain commonsense. Singularity and the Big Bang MUST have happened with the smallest base universe particles, the gravitons, that MUST be both energy and mass, even if they are inert mass just one smallest fraction of a second at singularity. All mass formats evolve from gravitons that convert into energy i.e. extricate from their gravitons clusters into mass formats in motion, energy. And they all end up again as mass in a repeat singularity. Universe expansion and re-contraction proceed simultaneously..